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i have been using ubuntu 12.10 for some time. After a certain update my machine got extremely slow. Boot time increased to almost 5 minutes, application startup time increased to 1-2 mins from seconds. During such delays the HDD seemed to be busy. To avoid any more pain, I switched to Linux mint nadia. Unfortunately i see the exact same issue with this as well.

I have used this same machine with both Ubuntu, fedora with no issues in the past.
I think this could be due to a HW issue because the issue is present in both ubuntu and Linux mint, or it could be an issue in a libraby from dabian. In any case I need help to diagnose this further, SO EXPECTING YOUR KIND SUPPORT.